CCCLXXVIII – Understanding Aeviternity

I’ve been thinking a lot about angels recently and that leads naturally to contemplation of the kind of experience of existence Angels have in Aeviternity. What the heck is Aeviternity? What is it like? How does it relate to the Eternal God or the Finite universe?

Let’s see where we can get on our own power first. Eternity I don’t struggle with conceptually because I can state how it works simply. God is perfect, all creation rests upon and is sourced from God, so God must see all subordinate creation at once, in all its iterations. How that looks exactly is a mystery and may remain a mystery even after death, and anyway it is not exactly spiritually helpful to contemplate. It is enough, for me, to know that God is perfect, God is source, and so God can both see and experience everything as complete and specific events as occurring.

Finity I don’t struggle with either because it is my own experience. Life has a natural course, time pushes us inexorably forward. We take it as a given, like water to a fish.

Aeviternity splits the difference, and it boggles my mind because I don’t really know how to think about it. If I think about it like regular time–Angels live their days like we do, but just at a higher level–then in order for Angels to function the way we know angels function, they have to break all kinds of rules about time. Do Angels get bored by waiting? If there was a time before creation, how much time was that?

Aeviternity is also the domain of Heaven and Hell (before the Eschaton–which, by the way, presents its own questions). Heaven and Hell we can think of as places, but how do we perceive suffering if we do not perceive time? If we do perceive time, how do we perceive eternity?

St. Thomas Aquinas describes Aeviternity as the mean between time and eternity, but from what I have been able to find does not go into the daily life aspects of it. He says that Eternity has no beginning and has no end; Time has a beginning and an end; so Aeviternity has a beginning but no end. St. Thomas notes that time is a measure of change. Because our material created order is constantly changing, time marks those changes. Angels and perfected souls in Heaven (or tormented souls in hell) are unchanging in their nature but changing in their “choice, affections, places”.

We can imagine a perfected created order–earth, sun, animals, essentially Eden as described in Genesis. Devoid of flaws, perfect qua creation, but still free qua agency. But rather than marking time qua creation, they would mark some kind of time qua agency?

For example: If I say an hour has passed, we know that the world has irrevocably gotten one hour older. Some finite number of persons in the world has died, some finite number of persons in the world has been born, some finite number of events has happened. If we take a slice of one hour and sought to understand it perfectly, we would see the birth, death, decay, renewal all happening at once. We would see threads connecting that slice to every slice that came before it and threads connecting that slice to every slice that comes after.

In Aeviternity, time doesn’t matter because creation itself is not changing, but we as beings can change. If I were to say an hour has passed in Aeviternity, the world itself would be the same. There would be no life, death, decay, renewal–not any that is uninformed by God’s divine will anyway, not any that is a result of a fallen cosmos. So an hour would not be marked by changing stuff, but changing beings. An hour in Aeviternity might signify a specific set of choices.

For example, we know Angels get to choose whether they are for God or against God and their choices are irrevocable. Their choices are irrevocable–the way the life, death, decay, and renewal is irrevocable once it happens. So what if the first “moment” of an Angels life is that first choice–for God or against God. The second “moment” of an Angels life is, perhaps, to choose a vocation–this Angel chose to carry the moon, that angel chose to be a guardian to a soul. Between these moments, perhaps the Angel can move about the created order, so we would perceive their movement as being instantaneous. But once they exercise their agency, they have experienced a moment in Aeviternity, and when that moment has passed they cannot go back. It connects them with the past and with the future, because all their choices determine what choices are available in the future.

Purgatory is one such choice souls make at the last judgement, and it is painful because it is the purifying of our created substance. It is a reconciliation of our imperfect substance and our perfect aeviternity. Choosing heaven means we can honor and glorify God and can do so eternally in the space between aeviternal “moments”. The aeviternal moments, in heaven, would be things like asking for answers to pressing eternal questions, perhaps however it is prayers are received, that is how they can be sorted individually, because they exist for us in time but for them they are timeless so a lifetime of prayers can all be mediated by one person. Though prayers for the intercession of saints are just asking for saints to pray to God on their behalf, so that could easily be an Aeviternal moment–the choice to ask God to intercede on behalf of a petitioner. And we can do whatever we want in the meantime, but each instance is an aeviternal moment. Perhaps the praying and interceding aren’t even choices, they are just things that can be done to occupy that space between moments that we would consider time but which isn’t time because the created order is unchanging.

In Hell, I think part of what makes it an eternal torment is because there are no more aeviternal moments. You have chosen against God and are cast into the eternal fire where your substance can never be reconciled with perfection, yet is aware of perfection creating a kind of cognitive dissonance. You might say you are aware you chose wrong with perfect clarity, and you are aware of your sins with perfect clarity, and must endure that knowledge without ceasing because there are no Aeviternal moments awaiting you. There is no knowledge or affection or intercession. You are cut off from the font of life. You can’t die because you don’t experience substantial change, and you can’t live because you can’t become perfected.

The glorification and resurrection is the reconciliation of Aeviternity with creation-time, a division which originates with the fall of Adam. All people–heaven and hell both–are glorified and resurrected. But that fact contradicts what I just said about Hell–are the denizens of Hell perfected or just resurrected? So if you are resurrected but not perfected, your suffering is both corporeal and eternal in the way I just described.

The concept of Aeviternal “moments” helps me to understand the idea a little better which was the goal, so I hope it is helpful to you too.

AMDG

CXXXI – Truthmakers and History

I am wading into a discussion I am neither equipped nor qualified to participate in, but as a thought experiment it piqued my curiosity so I will try my hand and let the experts run roughshod over my musings.

I first encountered the idea of Truthmakers via Ed Feser, here. Read this first. Today I saw an article by James Chastek at Just Thomism, here. That’s about all the preparation I have, besides the Metaphysics I’ve gleaned from the Orthosphere.

The question seems to be: How can past events be both true and not exist?

As mentioned I am unqualified for this so at this point I attempted to summarize the state of things but I can’t find the words. Read those two articles first and you’ll know everything I know about the issue.

Feser says Presentism holds that in our temporal realm, only present objects and events exist. Those who object to it suggest that past events and objects are true, so they must exist. Feser goes on to explain that they obviously do not exist in the same way that you or I exist, but they are true because they happened.

Chastek suggestions two additional solutions to the objection: If the contingency of events “prescinds from time” (or, if contingency of events is true, absent considerations of time) then there’s no special necessity for particular events at particular times. He says “There’s nothing in the concept of Lincoln requiring he be shot”.

The alternative is that contingency does not prescind from time, but if that’s the case then “past events as past cannot be otherwise”, which I take to mean that Object A is a current event and Object B is a past event, and a trait of Object B is that it is past and so cannot be conceived other than as a past event.

All of this is preamble. I ended up summarizing kind of.

Kristor has a metaphysical heuristic I like to use relating to “facts, acts, and truth“. In it, he describes present things as “occasions of becoming”, they are “in progress”. So this might actually conflict with what Feser said about only present things existing. The second an act is complete, it is in the past.

Let me approach this from a different angle.

Built into the present is the past. You cannot conceive of any present thing without some past thing. A wooden chair cannot exist if it was not assembled by a carpenter, or cut apart by a lumberer, or felled by a lumberjack, or exposed to sunlight, or planted as a seed, so on and so forth. The wooden chair does not exist apart from it’s past. It is the culmination of a sequence of completed acts going all the way back to the Prime Mover. The present is indistinct from the past, by definition.

Once an act is completed, it is unchangeable. I don’t know that I would say that makes it not contingent. It’s necessary as it pertains to the present, but not necessary insofar as God required it.

So then lets tackle the other part of the problem. Past events don’t exist. What does it mean to exist? It seems like presentism holds that existence is what Kristor would describe as “becoming”. Things that exist are becoming. The wooden chair is not a completed act, because a completed act implies necessarily that it is past. All completed acts lead to the current becoming of the chair.

The question about Truthmakers is “what makes this true”, which is another way of saying “is this a fact”. As Kristor explains, a Fact is a statement of truth. “The wooden chair exists” is true because exists implies it is actively becoming. “Abraham Lincoln Was Shot” is true because it is a completed act. “Abraham Lincoln Exists” is not true because Abraham Lincoln is not actively becoming. “Abraham Lincoln Existed” is true because Abraham Lincoln is no longer becoming.

This helps me wrap my head around the question, at any rate. I don’t think I’m putting forward any new arguments, but Kristor’s heuristic helps break it into useful chunks.

LXIX – Beginners Guide to Philosophy (No. 1)

What is Reality?

Everything we experience is contained within “reality”. Reality is everything. If you can sense it, it’s real. If you can think it, that too is real in that it is an actual thought you are actually having. Metaphysics and Philosophy both deal with explaining reality, and so reality is our first and fundamental question to this series.

Let’s take stock of what we have to work with. Look around you, look out the nearest window. We have bodies. Our bodies come with certain capabilities. Movement. Senses. We can, barring a physiological or material impediment, see and feel and taste and hear and smell the world around us.

We can probably see objects. I’m right now sitting at a computer, I have my phone in front of me. I’m typing and my words are appearing on the screen in front of me. The computer, phone, desk, chair: these are what we commonly refer to as inanimate objects. Outside my window I can see a few more things: trees, squirrels, birds, other animals and people scurry about.

From this, I think we can make a couple conclusions. There are at least three types of thing that populate reality. There are what I will call “objects”^[1] – these are things that vary in form or function, and can’t do anything on their own. I’ll even refine it further by saying that objects come in two forms: Natural and Unnatural. Natural objects exist the way they were produced by nature. The dirt, the trees, the rocks, these are natural objects. Unnatural objects are natural objects which have been acted upon. My phone is made of various plastics and metals, its derived from a bunch of natural objects, and remains an object in that it can’t do anything unless acted upon.

The second type of thing I will call “creatures”. Creatures can move around, collect objects, fly or crawl or climb. We, as humans, can do all of these things too. But we can tell that we are of a different kind than these creatures.

The third type of thing is us, and I will refer to us as “Beings”. Beings differ from creatures not in our animal qualities, but in our minds. We can think, discern, and act. We can feel emotions. We can act with force or gentleness, speak intelligibly, plan for the future and contemplate the past.

So what distinguishes all of these types of thing from each other? Objects are material and only material. They are made of stuff, and have no other qualities. Objects just are. Creatures are made of material. But they are full of life. Creatures are endowed with a kind of life-force. This life force enables them to move, to take care of their basic needs. It does not enable them with such a distinction as we have as beings. Their decisions are driven by what I will call “instinct”. Life-force, alone, does not allow life. It needs to be given direction, and instinct is this direction.

Beings are like creatures in that they are made of material and have a kind of life-force. But they have that strange quality that allows them to move and act differently than creatures. In no particular order, emotion is one of the things that defines Beings. Second, the ability to control our instinct and override it, is another thing that defines Beings. This deciding ability, this veto power over our creaturely life-force, is called agency. The emotive ability, the ability to feel things from our experiences, I will call conscience.

What Is Agency?

We have populated Reality with things (objects, creatures, and beings) and we have given them traits (material, instinct, and agency). So lets dig into this a little bit, and better understand the differences of the things within reality.

We’ve made a few claims without questioning the premise, so lets stop and do that now.

Life-force and instinct are the key element to transcending the world of objects and arriving at the world of creatures. Life-force is natural, that is, derived from nature, the same way that objects can be both natural and unnatural. Instinct is implied by the natural occurrence of life-force. Why is this so?

Life-force provides a creature with abilities. A monkey can climb. A horse can gallop. A bird can fly. Life-force is simply the ability. Unguided, a monkey can just climb until it dies. A horse can gallop until it disappears over the horizon. A bird can just keep flapping eternally. How does a creature know when to stop or start? What governs how or why or when it will use any of it’s given abilities? It necessarily must be instinct. A monkey climbs, and then stops when it is too tired. A horse can gallop, and then graze when it becomes hungry. A bird can fly, and then dive when it sees a predator. Life-force and instinct are co-dependent on each other. A creature without instinct cannot act in any meaningful way. An instinct without life force has nothing to steer.

How does agency differ from instinct then? Agency has power over instinct. A being might be hungry, but decide to not eat. A being might fear predators, but continue in spite of that fear. Agency also manifests differently in every being. Some beings decide to write blogs about metaphysics, other beings decide to play outside, while still other beings decide to be crooks and criminals. Agency is different in every being. Instinct is natural, like the life force it governs. Agency, having command over instinct, is supernatural, above and beyond nature. Beings differ also from creatures in the presence of conscience. Conscience is entirely absent from creatures. They do not feel with the depth that beings feel. They can bond, instinctively, into crude creaturely family units. But a creature cannot love it’s family unit the way a being loves it’s parents. Conscience, then, also transcends creaturely impulses. Conscience is also supernatural.

What is Supernatural Reality?

Agency and Conscience are our first hints at a reality above and beyond this one that we looked around at the beginning of this article. These are qualities that are supernatural and therefore must be derived from some kind of supernature. What do we know about it?

In order to answer that, let’s consider what kind of things populate this supernature. Natural things followed an additive order: Objects are made of material, creatures are objects with life-force, beings are creatures with agency. We can imagine that supernature continues this chain. We can imagine a being without a material, object based form. Beings that are pure agency, pure conscience. I will refer to these as “angels”. But what governs agency and conscience when it is removed from natural reality? It no longer has instincts, it no longer has objects. What governs angels use of agency and conscience? Further still, where do angels come from? They cannot be created by beings, because beings are material. So they must come from, and be governed by, something else.

That something else must be over and above angels, because angels must be governed by something, the way life-force is governed by instinct. That something else must be able to create angels out of nothing (out of no thing) because they are beings of pure agency and conscience. So the act of creating angels therefore must not reduce the thing that creates them, because it must be able to create other angels. I will call this something “the Divine”.

The Divine is the perfection of all things, because The Divine is irreducible. The Divine, being capable of creating supernatural beings (angels) out of no thing, what would prevent The Divine from being able to create things out of no thing?

Let us approach this from another direction. All Angels come directly from the Divine. All beings come from other beings. The first beings came from creatures. the first creatures came from objects. the first objects came from The Divine. The Divine is what Thomas Aquinas called the “Prime Mover”, the Uncaused Cause. The Divine is at the root of all things, and at the root of Reality.

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[1] – When I give something a label, I am not using the proper metaphysical label. I am using common language, not jargon, for ease of representation. Try to shed any baggage a particular word carries, and consider only my definition for the time being. I hope to get more specific in subsequent articles.

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